Social-Movement Unionism and U.S. Labor's Uncertain Future

Social movement unionism is one of the experiments of bringing together different issues and struggles associated with workers. The idea has been critiqued by different scholars because of different confrontations associated with issues and strategies. The paper argues that such discomfort arises from a monolithic understanding of social movements and their subjects. Assumption of ideological uniformity restricts analysis of the confronting nature of subjects and subjectivities as well as factions and fragmentation of movements. Here, the attempt is to understand diversity in movements through ‘contra-sectionality’. The ethnography for research was conducted on a movement named Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (Mazdoor Karyakarta Samiti) in Chhattisgarh. Through a contra-sectional analysis, the article reflects on fragmented consciousness and its implication for the movement.

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Mass Strikes in India and Brazil as the Terrain for a New Social Movement Unionism

Development and Change ◽

10.1111/dech.12320 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 48 (5) ◽

pp. 965-986 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Jörg Nowak

Keyword(s):

Social Movement ◽

Social Movement Unionism ◽

New Social Movement

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Phantoms and Spectres: Capital and Labour at the Millennium

Environment and Planning D Society and Space ◽

10.1068/d180015 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 18 (1) ◽

pp. 15-36 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Andy Merrifield

Keyword(s):

Social Movement ◽

World Literature ◽

Class Struggle ◽

South East Asia ◽

Communist Manifesto ◽

Social Movement Unionism ◽

Modern Capitalism ◽

Radical Critique ◽

Fictitious Capital ◽

Political Economic

As the financial system tailspins and ‘Asian Flu’ reverberates everywhere and as 950 million people in South-East Asia struggle to get by on less than one dollar a day, Marx's ideas continue to nourish radical critique and action. If anything, his vision is more economically meaningful and more politically viable today than ever before. In this paper I try to bring Marx's insights on the “laws of motion” of modern capitalism to bear on prevailing global political-economic disorder. I discuss, more specifically, his theory of crisis and the dialectics of accumulation and circulation of “real” and “fictitious” capital as sketched out in the Grundrisse and Capital (volumes 1 and 3). I end with an exploration of the famous political prognosis from The Communist Manifesto of mass collective class struggle and the development of a “world literature”, and set all this within the context of a newly emerging workers' internationalism and social-movement unionism.

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